Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
English once had two separate pairs of "yes/no"-type words, one for positive questions and one for negative questions. The other pair was "yay/nay", which has fallen out of use in that form as question-answering words except for when legislatures record their official votes, because legislatures love to (sometimes) pretend it's still a few hundred years ago (or try to and get it wrong). In speech that isn't quoting a law book, they've evolved into the modern "yah" and "nah" but they don't mean something distinct from "yes/no" anymore. ("Yay" also still sort-of exists as an exclamation.)
...which is also now threatened by a relative of the same blight that eliminated the previous kind of banana (although it's been that way for years and we've managed to keep putting off the bananageddon so far).
So whether or not it it's ambiguous is ambiguous!
It's not inherently ambiguous, but there's a particular type of logical error which is so common that the error is so likely to occur that it's as if it were ambiguous anyway. Misinterpreting/misunderstanding/mis-hearing by not noticing a negative is so common that there's a standard bit of public-relations & public-speaking advice to avoid negatives even in statements, not just in questions. Otherwise, when you do include a negative and everybody in your audience hears it clearly, some measurable & significant portion of them will still think they heard the same statement minus the negative anyway. Negatives are the most likely words (and prefixes) to disappear from people's minds even when they catch all the rest of the same sentence. And I think to some extent we all know that, even if only informally, which in turn causes us to wonder if it's happened even in cases where it didn't.
That apparent self-contradiction at the end is a change I've been noticing in English lately. I never heard it at all before about a decade ago, and now it's ubiquitous.
I understand that people who say it are essentially thinking of the two words as addressing two different subjects ("yes, I heard & understood & acknowledge* what was just said, but no, I don't agree with it"), but the juxtaposition (with nothing else between them to indicate the change in subject) is so jarring that I really don't get how anybody could have ever gotten started doing it, or why nobody else ever mentions how bizarre the juxtaposition sounds.
Another jarring thing I've been hearing over about the last decade, about which I don't get how anybody ever got started on it or why nobody else ever seems to point out how bizarre it is: person 1 explains what (s)he thinks about something and then person 2 uses "no" for agreement
when person 2 is about to add more reasons for the same conclusion. I suppose it must have originated as a negative response to something else which person 2 thinks person 1 might be thinking but hasn't said yet, such as that person 1 is awaiting/expecting a disagreement, or that person 1 thinks the reasons (s)he gave are all there are... so the agreeing "no" is essentially "no, I don't disagree" or "no, those aren't the only reasons to think that"... but the bottom line is that, if person 1 didn't say such a thing, and person 2 doesn't elaborate on it, it still ends up just being a "no" in agreement. (I'm not sure I've ever encountered this one from anybody who isn't Californian.)* "Heard, understood, & acknowledged/affirmed" also gives us "HUA", which is used in the American army both as an answer and as a question to which "HUA" is the expected answer. If you've heard it in movies, you might have mistaken it for a non-yelled version of a generic yell of "Hooo-aaah!". Or maybe that was where it started and then somebody retrofitted "HUA" later.
So... are you not saying scale doesn't matter?
Last edited:
